Here is a sensitive, intelligent portrait of film director Howard Brookner made by his nephew Aaron – a film-maker of some note, too. It also indulges in a little literary excavation, and functions as a window on the mid-1980s New York gay community that was decimated by the Aids epidemic.

Howard Brookner’s reputation chiefly rests on a documentary profile of novelist William S Burroughs, who he filmed in the writer’s latter years – initially – while at New York University film school. (An unexpected byplay is that Brookner’s sound recordist on the Burroughs film turns out to be an equally studenty Jim Jarmusch, and his cinematographer was Tom DiCillo, another director-to-be.) As Aaron Brookner – who bears a striking resemblance to his uncle – chases down Howard’s Burroughs footage, we are given a glimpse into the afterlife of literary legends: obtaining access to it means getting past the gatekeeper-esque possessiveness of the poet John Giorno, Burroughs’s former collaborator and now inhabitant of Burrough’s old “Bunker” in New York’s Bowery.

William Burroughs - the original Junkie

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However, once Brookner Jr gets his hands on the footage, the focus of his film changes: his search for his uncle’s presence means we get to see out-takes, clapper-boards, trims – the detritus of film-making. That it also includes shots of Burroughs along with Andy Warhol and Allen Ginsberg seems merely coincidental.

Brookner tracks his uncle’s career as he took on another film, the rare and little-seen documentary about Robert Wilson’s mammoth Olympic opera project The Civil Wars; and then the Damon Runyon musical Bloodhounds of Broadway, which was Howard’s first and last orthodox feature film. He died in 1989, aged 34, shortly before its release.

Not unnaturally, familial nostalgia and the enduring shock over Howard’s premature death override any objective assessment of this slim output, and that is not this film’s purpose . Aaron Brookner is creating a family relic, one that explores the problems of a stifled adulthood – Howard’s parents are somewhat disgruntled when he announces he wants to bring his boyfriend home – but one that is threaded through with the tragedy of impending disaster. One interviewee remarks that, a year or two after the footage was taken, half the people in shot were dead. It’s impossible to remain unmoved.